Eastern Conference Champions

Eastern Conference Champions are an indie rock band from Philidelphia, PA formed in 2005. The band consists of Josh Ostrander (guitar, vocals), Greg Lyons (drums) and Vern Zaborwoski (bass). Ostrander and Lyons were former members of Laguardia and Zawbrowski is the former bassist of CKY.

A semi-factual version of how ECC came to be... Two longtime friends and bandmates, Josh and Greg weren’t happy with the way their old band was going. So they left. They left behind good friends; they opted out of a major label record deal, they stopped going on cross-country excursions and missed out on gallons of free booze. It was a long, lonely summer for the two fancy lads. Basically, an average day for them would be to rise out of bed at 7 a.m., meet each other at a crummy landscaping job, say short-lived goodbyes at 5:30 and rendezvous at 8 for a two-man writing and recording session. This process was repeated over and over (and over) again for a solid four months. Luckily, the bastards recorded some good songs: ditties that portrayed their blue collar misery while reeking of liberation and lost love. “Let’s play live”, they both agreed. The only problem was, they needed the right person to join them. Enter Vern. Equally disheveled as the other two and even more disgruntled with a former band; he was another voice of the working man and the best bass player the boys could ask for. “I’ll play with you fuckers”, he happily declared as the three downed cold lagers and warm whiskey. At that exact moment in random parts of the world; a baby was conceived, a choir sang, a boy and girl shared their first kiss, a homeless man stumbled upon a bag of money, a power grid went out in a major metropolitan area, a winning touchdown was scored, an actor gave the best performance of his career, the moon became aligned with Jupiter, an angel earned her wings and the Eastern Conference Champions were born.